KVM Guest Drivers for Windows 2018
Overview
This page describes how to obtain and use virtio drivers for Windows virtual machines running on KVM, and additional software agents for Windows VMs.
Yum|Dnf Repo
There are a yum|dnf repo shipping ‘virtio-win’ RPMs. The RPMs install driver binaries and agent installers on your host machine into /usr/share. These bits can then be shared with Windows VMs.
Install the repo file:
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sudo wget https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/virtio-win.repo</a> -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtio-win.repo |
Then install the virtio-win package with DNF or YUM:
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sudo dnf install virtio-win sudo yum install virtio-win |
The .repo file provides two different repositories:
- virtio-win-stable
- This provides builds of virtio-win that roughly correlates to what was shipped with the most recent RHEL release, meaning they have received a decent chunk of testing.
- This repo is enabled by default.
- virtio-win-latest
- This provides the latest driver builds. They may be development quality, or bug free, or complete broken. Caveat emptor 🙂
- This repo is disabled by default. If you want to update from virtio-win-stable to the latest bits, do:
sudo yum --enablerepo=virtio-win-latest update virtio-win
or with dnf: sudo dnf --enablerepo=virtio-win-latest upgrade virtio-win
RPM contents
- /usr/share/virtio-win/*.iso: ISO CDROM containing all the drivers. See details below
- /usr/share/virtio-win/*.vfd: VFD floppy images for using during install of Windows XP
- /usr/share/virtio-win/drivers: Copy of the extracted VFD driver contents
- /usr/share/guest-agent/*.msi: QEMU Guest Agent 32bit and 64bit MSI installers
ISO contents
The .iso contains the following bits:
- NetKVM/: Virtio Network driver
- viostor/: Virtio Block driver
- vioscsi/: Virtio SCSI driver
- viorng/: Virtio RNG driver
- vioser/: Virtio serial driver
- Balloon/: Virtio Memory Balloon driver
- qxl/: QXL graphics driver for Windows 7 and earlier. (build virtio-win-0.1.103-1 and later)
- qxldod/: QXL graphics driver for Windows 8 and later. (build virtio-win-0.1.103-2 and later)
- pvpanic/: QEMU pvpanic device driver (build virtio-win-0.1.103-2 and later)
- guest-agent/: QEMU Guest Agent 32bit and 64bit MSI installers
- qemupciserial/: QEMU PCI serial device driver
- *.vfd: VFD floppy images for using during install of Windows XP
Direct download
Direct downloads are available for the .iso, .vfd, and qemu-ga installers.
- Stable virtio-win iso: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso
- Stable virtio-win x86 floppy: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win_x86.vfd
- Stable virtio-win amd64 floppy: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win_amd64.vfd
- Latest virtio-win iso: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/virtio-win.iso
- Latest virtio-win x86 floppy: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/virtio-win_x86.vfd
- Latest virtio-win amd64 floppy: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/virtio-win_amd64.vfd
- Latest qemu-ga files: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-qemu-ga/
- Full archive: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/
- Changelog: https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/CHANGELOG
If you previously used isos from alt.fedoraproject.org, note that these new isos have a different file layout (matching RHEL isos). If you need to access the old isos you can do so here. However these isos are deprecated and only kept around for back compatability. No new isos will be added there.